| About 7 months ago, when the 9700 pro came out I did some serious benchmarking alongside my old geforce 4200ti and posted the results on graffe.com. I used Fraps in game and did control tests with several other games to establish that my hardware was properly working and that the ATI was very much dominant in those games in all situations. My rig is a p4 2.53, 1gb 3200 ddr, 80gb hd, audigy soundcard on a cable connection running winxp.
On average I found that the ATI card seemed to have problems rendering the SoL models and in the bazaar I would get around 8 fps with approx 300 people from a set of 4 angles and controlled pans I used in the test. The Geforce was getting 12fps in the same angles, with the same settings. Now, when I did my texture rendering tests and panned a view over serveral areas including from the Tower of the Twilight Sea the ATI absolutely destroyed the Geforce and when I turned on AAx8, ASFx16, the ATI was plugging away like a champ and sitting near 40fps. The geforce in the same scenarious with max settings was worse than a slideshow getting like 2 fps.
I don't know what it is about the SoL models but they ATI cards really seem to have problems rendering them efficiently. Maybe it's different now with the Catlyst 3.4 drivers but this game sucks and I don't play it anymore so you'll have to test that yourself. =p |